Perth

By David Whish-Wilson

...we rarely travel far to swim. We occasionally cross the river to Leighton or Cottesloe, where the white sand squeaks underfoot and the champagne foam in the shallows tingles the legs and fizzes over the shoreline and makes children giddy with delight... the cirrus clouds above the horizon often resemble passages of perfect cursive script written in soft white lines against the bluest page. David Whish-Wilson's Perth is a place where deeper historical currents are never far beneath the surface. Like the Swan River that can flow in two directions at once, Perth strikes perfect harmony with the city's contradictions and eccentricities. Whish-Wilson takes us beyond the near-constant sunshine, shiny glass facades, and boosterish talk of mining booms and the gloom after the bust. Lyrical and sensitive, he introduces his readers to the richness of the natural world and the trailblazers, the rebels, the occasional ghost, and the ordinary people that bring Australia's remotest capital city to life. Carefully researched, full of personal reminiscences and eye-opening facts, this updated edition of Perth now has a remarkable new postscript.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781742244969

Book preview

Introduction

It’s late afternoon on a spring day, and I’m looking out over Perth as I wander alongside the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fifteenth storey of Gordon Stephenson House. This government building is new, part of the award-winning one40william project that rises over the equally new Perth Underground train station. The windows are tinted green but they’re clear enough that I can see squalls running low and fumy to the south, trailing ropes of grey rain. And yet the sky above the CBD is blue, and the streets are awash with brilliant light. Even through the jade glass I can feel sunshine on my face.

I’ve spent the afternoon in the temporary home of the City of Perth Library, working my way through the archives. While there are as many ‘Perths’ as people who live here, of course, I wanted to commence the research for this book by revisiting two stories that have stayed with me over the years: one because I didn’t understand its significance as a child, the other because it captured my imagination. This beginning also reflects the approach that I’ve taken in the following chapters. Each takes its name from a natural formation or feature of Perth – the river, the coast, the plain and the light – that has evoked characters and events, moving backwards and forwards in time. The two stories that made an impression on me as a child take place in different centuries, but both represent something about the character of the city I call home.

The first time I heard the story of Fanny Balbuk, she wasn’t given a name. I can’t even remember which teacher told me about her in primary school. He must have been a good storyteller, though, because the images were powerfully clear. Fanny Balbuk came from the Whadjuk clan of the Nyungar, the Indigenous people of south-west Western Australia, and one of the largest language groups in the country. She was born and raised on the Swan River at Matagarup, or Heirisson Island. The year of her birth was 1840, barely a decade after Europeans established the Swan River Colony and not long before her father died on Rottnest Island. Like many of his kinsmen, he’d been imprisoned there for stealing flour.

Balbuk expressed her frustration at the development of the Georgian village on her country by stubbornly continuing to follow the tracks of her ancestors. According to Daisy Bates, the Irish Australian who observed and recorded Western Australian Indigenous culture in the first half of the twentieth century:

To the end of her life [Balbuk] raged and stormed at the usurping of her beloved home ground … a straight track led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms.

Bates goes on to describe how one of Balbuk’s ‘favourite annoyances was to stand at the gates of Government House, reviling all who dwelt within, in that the stone gates guarded by a sentry enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground’.

Neither Bates nor Balbuk was alive to see it, but Balbuk’s refusal to be ignored and the records Bates kept of Balbuk’s clan territory helped the Federal Court to rule in 2006 that native title continued to exist in Perth, the first time such a claim had been upheld in an Australian capital city. Balbuk died in 1907. There is a photograph of her as an older woman against a backdrop of scrub. She is wearing a chaste ankle-length skirt and a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned to her neck, her face framed by long grey hair, but the image captures the pride and defiance in her eyes.

Where I stand in the south-eastern corner of the fifteenth floor, I can clearly follow Balbuk’s route from the edge of the CBD at the Causeway, past the Governor’s residence, heading north up Barrack Street towards the Perth train station that was built on the reclaimed freshwater lake. Balbuk’s story has always been a reminder to me that beneath the geometric frame of the modern city – the bar-graph rectangles of concrete, glass and steel across the skyline – there exist footpads worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart. I have found myself in other cities, on other continents, seated on park benches or riding the trains, thinking about Fanny Balbuk, keeping to her straight track through the streets of Perth.

Fanny Balbuk’s yearning for what had been taken from her is very different from the yearning of mid-twentieth-century Perth for what it might become: the City of Light whose significance, its burghers hoped, could no longer be ignored. The first sign of the tension between the city’s aspirations and the relaxed lives of its inhabitants surfaced after Perth’s gesture of solidarity with an American astronaut in February 1962. John Glenn was solo-orbiting Earth, a fellow traveller on the dark edge of what was known. Perth kept its lights on overnight to keep the lonely Glenn company, but this action triggered a latent desire to be noticed, and admired, that became a source of amusement to many of Perth’s citizens.

Perth in 1962 was a small city blessed with natural riches but not much wealth. Its isolation from the eastern states was keenly felt: Perth had only been connected by trunk line since 1930 and by train since 1917; flights were expensive. It was beside the point that the ‘City of Light’ title bestowed upon Perth put the city in competition with Paris, which had earned the name as a centre for new ideas during the Enlightenment. What mattered was that John Glenn had seen Perth from outer space, and he was grateful. I was told this story as a child with the stress absolutely on Glenn’s courage, drifting alone in a capsule through the darkness of space. It was clear from the telling that Perth’s desire to comfort Glenn was born purely out of a spirit of camaraderie (not for our military ally, but for the astronaut), although this was only the beginning of the story.

The tale of isolated Perth and what was perceived to be its generous act went viral, by the standards of the early 1960s. Jenny Gregory is a Winthrop Professor of History at the University of Western Australia, and in City of Light: A History of Perth Since the 1950s she notes that unknown Perth was exposed to prime-time network television audiences in the United States and was mentioned in The New York Times. Western Australia’s premier, David Brand, had been enthusiastic about allowing the streetlights to burn all night, but Perth’s mayor, Harry Howard, had not. In fact, he was quoted in the afternoon paper the Daily News as stating that because of the costs involved the idea was ‘morally wrong’. Prior to the astronaut’s flyover, the front-page headline thundered, ‘It’s a Waste, Says Howard.’

But then the letters of thanks started pouring in from the United States, which put Mayor Howard in an awkward position. Jenny Gregory points out the resulting ‘great attitudinal’ gulf, listing some of the patriotic and grateful correspondence from abroad in contrast to the satirical ditties sung around Perth and Paul Rigby’s biting cartoons in the Daily News. According to Gregory, Howard was receiving letters asking for his ‘photo, his autograph, even a button from his shirt’.

Author Ron Davidson, now in his early eighties and one of the city’s great raconteurs, recently reminded me that ‘Perth was always a city full of cheeky people’, and so it was. Things just got better for the eager satirists when Mayor Howard accepted an invitation from the mayor of New York to attend John Glenn’s ticker-tape parade through Manhattan.

Howard, in his full mayoral regalia, was feted by the crowd of four million who turned out to cheer Glenn. He was placed in the third car of the procession, behind only the astronaut and US president John F. Kennedy. Robert Drewe’s 1986 novel Fortune describes the mayor on his own relative journey into intercontinental space: ‘no astronaut was more overwhelmed by the emotion of the occasion, or waved and smiled more heartily at the cheering New Yorkers … As his city beamed up at gallant John Glenn, so he beamed up at the towers of Wall Street.’

After such heady days, it must have been hard for Howard to return to his asbestos and tin city visible to the world only from outer space. Howard tried to lure Glenn to Perth by sending him a photo of Tania Verstak, Miss Australia 1961 and Miss International 1962, ‘so that you can see your image has been admired by someone of exceptional beauty, and she is indeed typical of our Australian girls’. Journalist Michael Charlton might have declaimed, ‘Fair Tania, you make the bright sun seem dim,’ but the rather sad strategy failed – although for a while money dribbled in from Yanks eager to ‘help pay the light bill’.

As I look across at the glass towers of Perth’s business heart, St Georges Terrace, I’m reminded of the news trumpeted in the morning paper that fifty years after Mayor Howard’s journey to Manhattan, the mountain is finally coming to Mohammed: Wall Street investment banking firm Goldman Sachs is opening a Perth office. The article was accompanied by breathless descriptions of Perth’s new charms, the regeneration of the CBD with swanky restaurants and niche bars and cosmopolitan festival events, and the new confidence that the city might be shaking off its ‘Dullsville’ tag. But there is ambivalence, too, at the growing pains that are also evident: rumours that the numbers of people arriving weekly are being downplayed; the scale of the suburban sprawl; the newly clogged roads and expense of basic foodstuffs; the fear that affluence is exhibited in ways that diminish rather than enhance community – bigger cars, bigger boats, bigger houses, higher walls.

The lights of the city have come on in dazzling fluorescent straps, spreading out from the CBD along sulphur-lit arteries. They make it easier to see the four spokes of the growth corridors that spread in long suburban chains north-west towards Joondalup, north-east towards Ellenbrook, south-east towards Armadale and south-west towards Mandurah. Until recently Perth was the fastest-growing capital city in Australia, courtesy of the latest mining boom, and most of the growth is suburban.

The first mining boom, in the 1890s, cycled 500 000 people through a city that until then consisted of 48 000 colonists. Tens of thousands of men and women camped in tent cities located at Claisebrook near the Causeway and in parts of Fremantle. Victorian (or t’othersider) communities soon emerged in what are today the inner-city suburbs of Subiaco, Victoria Park and North Perth, while more established residents tended to stay near the river.

Now there are suburbs on the margins of the city that I’ve never heard of, and my three-year-old street directory is hopelessly out of date. In one or two of the newer suburbs I’ve driven through, the fast-food infrastructure has been completed but the franchises remain surrounded by acres of sand, waiting for the people to come. In other subdivisions, ye olde Potemkin village centres have been plonked down among the suburban streets, seemingly overnight, a sleight of hand designed to evoke memories of community from other places.

From the heights, Perth is a densely treed landscape. The only exception is the white stucco blocks of Northbridge at my feet, port of call for so many migrant communities over the years. The notorious old slums of East Perth up the road (where the population density in the early twentieth century was double that of Sydney’s Paddington) have been redeveloped. The edges of the CBD are defined to the east by the 1960s curves of the Police Headquarters and to the west by Parliament House, severed from the city by the high walls of the sunken Mitchell Freeway. Some of the earliest Georgian buildings erected by the first settlers are still there, albeit dwarfed by glass towers, as are some of the convict-built civic structures and goldrush Victorian buildings of the 1890s.

It occurs to me now, up here, that if the first iron-ore boom had happened in the 1920s rather than the 1960s, Perth might have closely resembled golden-age Los Angeles, whose Mediterranean climate it shares. We might have graceful Art Deco towers rather than the beige office blocks that largely replaced the ‘Parisian’ streetscape of the 1900s St Georges Terrace. Art Deco suits Perth’s pure light, and like the Art Deco movement, with its optimism for a shiny humanist future brighter than what eventuated, Perth has also been a city cast in the shadow of its promise and potential – the enduring fever-dream of the City of Light.

As a result, Perth is a city of great contradictions. Statistics tell us that it’s the sunniest of all Australian capitals, and that it has proportionally the highest number of boat owners and backyard swimming pools. But Perth also has the highest rates of incarceration, with nearly half of those imprisoned being Aboriginal people, and one of the highest rates of homelessness. Perth is the capital city with the highest proportion of residents born overseas (forty-one per cent), although roughly one-third of these migrants came from Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa (a similarly large number are from South-east Asia). It is a city with low unemployment and high wages for skilled workers, yet much of this depends upon the volatile mining sector. The two-speed economy generated by the latest boom affects the cost of living for all residents, making life tough for those who aren’t well paid.

Perth is often described as the world’s most isolated capital city. It’s a title less relevant than it was for most of the twentieth century, when flying interstate was expensive and the Nullarbor Plain was crossed via dirt track. Before the 1890s gold rush, people didn’t see themselves as being isolated from the eastern states, where almost nobody came from (because nobody wanted to come). Instead they measured distance from the mother country, and of course Perth is closer to Britain than either Sydney or Melbourne. Perth became by definition an isolated provincial capital after Federation in 1901, only eleven years after the colony had been granted self-government, and only thirtyodd years before it tried to secede from Australia. During the Depression years of the 1930s, it was felt that the ‘Hume Highway Hegemony’ of Canberra–Sydney–Melbourne wasn’t acting in Western Australia’s best interests.

As historian Geoffrey Bolton points out in Land of Vision and Mirage, the effect of the first sixty years of Perth’s isolated existence, before the first wave of migration from the eastern states in the 1890s, needn’t be overstated. Yet it’s there in the language, in the roughly 750 distinctively used words, such as ‘verge’ for nature strip, ‘crosswalk’ for zebra crossing and ‘brook’ for small stream, and Nyungar words such as ‘boondy’ for small stone (sand-boondies are what kids throw at each other in the playground or on building sites) and ‘gidgee’ for Hawaiian sling/spear, none of which made it across the Nullarbor.

The effect of isolation is also there in the contrarian spirit that saw Perth rail against the perceived disinterest of the British government for most of the nineteenth century, and against Canberra since 1901, resulting in the belief that, according to Bolton:

in their isolated community, disagreements should never be pushed too far, but all should stick together. No doubt this was convenient to those who wielded political and economic power … and no doubt troublemakers and dissenters often found it hard to gain a serious hearing, but this clannish sense of fundamentally shared identity of interest seems to have formed an effective social cement.

If anything, Perth’s distance from the other Australian cities fostered a spirit of making-do and innovation. The city may remain on the margins of the national consciousness, but I suspect that this is of little concern to most residents, if only because modern Perth is a city that doesn’t look in on itself. The sky that fills so much of any view across the city, the ocean horizon, the lowness and roundedness of the ancient hills – all induce an outward-looking frame of mind and a corresponding awareness of other lives and places.

There’s also something about Perth’s isolation that paradoxically diminishes any sense of real physical distance. Sometimes you forget that the nearest cities are many hours’ drive away to the south and north, and that the nearest capital city is more than 2000 kilometres away – not a great deal fewer than Perth’s favourite overseas holiday destination in Indonesia. This, coupled with the time it takes to get anywhere else, has accustomed us to a love of the journey, an easygoingness inspired by a nonchalance about distance. Even distant cities on distant continents never seem too far away, merely just over the horizon, like everything else.

A city with porous boundaries, Perth has rarely contained the desires of its younger citizens, many of whom journey to find experience elsewhere, while a large population of workers commute hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometres to their workplaces. This is only the latest expression of a mobile urban population that has always had strong social links to those who live ‘in the country’ or ‘on the mines’. It’s a mobility that reinforces the sense that largely suburban Perth sits easily upon the land, and on occasions feels as ephemeral as an encampment.

From the fifteenth storey, too, I’m reminded that Perth is a city of arcades: shaded strips over narrow paths running right through the city from south to north. I fondly remember my visits as a child from the mining towns of the north-west: the thrilling pressure of human traffic funnelled through the arcades in what was otherwise a lifetime lived outdoors, the close smells of cooking and perfume and multicultural humanity captured within the cool and noisy tunnels that echoed to your shout.

The arcades are a hangover from the initial surveying of the city

Reviews for Perth

[samwilson.id.au · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The most substantial difference between the newer suburbs and the old is due to the fact that when the older suburbs were conceived there wasn't the machinery to grade the individual blocks, or to infill each subdivision to make sure that it rose above the water table. As a result, what is appealing about the older suburbs isn't that they are leafier, and therefore cooler in summer, but that the blocks rise and fall upon the rests and swales of the hardened limestone dunes that roll inland across the the plain. Each house and street conforms to its original and cambered landscape, and often some of the original flora remains. Newer suburbs are generally bulldozed and re-contoured with powerful machinery according to a design predicated upon the level, taking out all of the native bush in one sweep." —p.180